From Comet to Cal Mac by Donald E Meek & Bruce Peter

Two Centuries of Hebridean & Clyde Shipping

"From Comet to Cal Mac: Two Centuries of Hebridean & Clyde
Shipping" by Donald E Meek & Bruce Peter is an absolutely magnificent book
that should be considered essential reading by anyone with any interest in the
pivotal role that shipping has played, and continues to play, in the
development of the settlements of the Clyde Estuary, of the western seaboard,
and of the Hebrides. A superbly researched text is accompanied by excellent
images, all with helpful and informative captions, and the overall result is as
near a definitive account as it seems possible to achieve.

In August 1812, Europe's first commercial seagoing steamship, The
Comet, began service between Port Glasgow and the Broomielaw, the quay on the
River Clyde in the centre of Glasgow. In June 2011, Scotland's
newest ferry, the Finlaggan, began
service on the route linking Islay
with the mainland. The intervening 199 years saw dramatic changes sweep across
Scotland, and the story of the many ships serving Scottish communities between
the Comet and the Finlaggan is at
the heart of many of those changes.

The story which is so beautifully presented and lovingly told in
this book is a complex one, as it covers two very distinct parts of the
country, and because it is intimately connected with two revolutions which took
place in land based transport during the same period. The authors have arranged
their material in a chronological sequence, but they also alternate between
chapters covering the rather different paths of development in the Clyde
Estuary on the one hand and in the Hebrides on the other.

Much of the early pace was set, literally at times, in the Clyde
Estuary and the authors do not hold back with their descriptions of some of the
social problems caused by the mass descent of
Glasgow's working class on the
genteel settlements of Argyll: the "ordinary rabble" to quote an advert for a
temperance ship. The pattern was changed with the arrival of the railways,
first along the Clyde, linking with shorter sailings, and its later arrival in
places like Oban and
Mallaig, opening up the steamer
crossings to the Hebrides to an unprecedented degree. The story of the 20th
Century is one of halted progress in two world wars, followed by
underinvestment during the early years of car ferries: and, finally, by a
proper recognition of the pivotal role of modern and effective vehicle ferries
in truly connecting Scotland's islands with the rest of the country.
Travellers' tales recounted here of journeys intimately shared with drunks or
cattle, or both, on small ships sometimes ill-suited to the services they
operated, lead the reader pretty inevitably to the conclusion that we really
have "never had it so good" as we do today.